With President Obama’s signing of the Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act of 2016 and the passing of recent legislation in New York, there are signs of hope that beginning in 2017, humans may once again have a fighting chance of purchasing a ticket to a hot concert, show or event.

It took ticket prices reaching $1000 per head for the award-winning Broadway show “Hamilton”, to force action against ticket bots getting the best seats in the house. Lin-Manuel Miranda who created and stars in Hamilton wrote a compelling Op-Ed in the New York Times in June 2016 entitled “Stop the Bots from Killing Broadway.” Finally, in December New York Gov. Cuomo passed a bill to make ticket bot purchases illegal. As one of the founding fathers of the US Constitution, it seems that Hamilton would have approved of an amendment that protected “the right to buy tickets.”

So how did ticket bots get control over the ticket purchases? The cybercriminal ecosystem has evolved over the past few years to make it easier to launch automated attacks on web and mobile apps with the purpose of stealing assets. In the case of ticket bots, automated scripts running on rented botnets enable the immediate and rapid purchase of tickets to popular events once they go on sale. Humans don’t have a chance against a machine intent on purchasing tickets. Until now.

With the recently passed ticket bot legislation, it is officially illegal to use ticket bots with the purpose of automated purchasing. Now ticket sellers are protected against fraud by state fines and possible jail time as a deterrent. With this new legislation, ticket sellers must also tighten up their defenses so that they can prevent the use of ticket bots proactively. Just stating that the use of automation and ticket bots is not allowed will no longer be sufficient as a defense.

Enforcing this legislation will have some challenges given the number of parties involved in automated ticket purchases. The illegal ticket reseller is in many cases at the outer edge of a cybercriminal ecosystem that is rapidly building out infrastructure and services on the Dark Web. In addition to automated ticket purchases, automated credential stuffing attacks for account takeover and malicious content scraping are affecting retail, travel and ecommerce businesses. The threat of fines and possible jail time for ticket bots will hopefully go some way to drying up some of the demand for cybercriminal automation.

Shows such as Hamilton were created for humans to enjoy, and at Shape Security we believe consumers shouldn’t have to fight bots to get a ticket. Every day at Shape Security we help major companies defend against automated attacks by bots, and we applaud this new legislation outlawing ticket bots.